Bedwetting: Have We Seen the Back of it?

I’ve posted extensively here about J’s bedwetting. We have tried a few things over the past year after seeing the school nurse.

To begin with we tried increasing bladder capacity by drinking more during the day. This didn’t go very well as J is at school 5 days a week and most of his drinking time is then. I’d encouraged him to drink his full, large water bottle during the day and for a while that seemed to be working. Then school changed the rules on where the drinks bottles were kept and then most days it came back nearly full. I really think teachers should think before they make changes that make accessing things like drinks more difficult as it makes it tricky for everyone. This change meant that J wasn’t meeting his drinking target – he was supposed to drink 1.5 litres a day and that was difficult enough to achieve if the water bottle was being finished. If it wasn’t drunk at school, it became nearly impossible. Now I could have gone to the school and asked for a different rule, but that would have meant embarrassing J and singling him out. The thing is that any change that means children drink less at school has to be a negative as being hydrated is good for their brains, so you’d think it would be in the school’s interests to make it easy for them to drink as much as possible.

The other thing we tried was using an alarm. This wasn’t a huge success. Once it went off waking me in the next room, but not J. Then there was the issue that it was supposed to be attached to underwear, but J resisted wearing underwear under his pyjamas, so a lot of the time it was attached to his PJ bottoms. Sometimes this meant that he wet the bed and the alarm didn’t go off. A few times though it has woken him early on in the bedwetting and he’s been able to stop it. This has meant a less wet bed and sometimes only wet pyjamas.